Work In Progress

On November 8, some Catalystas attended the Work in Progress Conference in Wellington.

We had the privilege of listening to a whole day of incredible speakers who opened our minds to what the future of work looks like.

What will our new workforce look like? What portion of it will be human? What technologies will we have available? How is this affecting our economy, and how are we going to respond?

One thing that particularly struck a chord with us was what the future of education and workplace training will look like. There’s an obvious need for workplaces and education providers to shift tactics and be more responsive to the ‘new collar’ worker - the worker who will retrain and change jobs several times in their lifetime. How are our children, teenagers and young adults learning? Are they being adequately prepared for the job market 5, 10 or 20 years from now?

We certainly came away with a lot of questions and a lot of food for thought.

With a changing education system and a changing employment structure, we need the right tools to make sure the needs of our employees, employers, students and educators are being met.

Tools like Mahara, our ePortfolio system which is already used in around 1600 schools in New Zealand alone and many more around the world. Mahara is already used by many professions: nurses, doctors, lawyers, teachers - for managing their CPD. Learning systems like Moodle which has a huge range of functions to complement learning and professional development programmes. And Totara Learn, to address learning and performance management needs in almost any style that suits your own business.

We’ll be using Totara internally for our Catalyst staff so we can continue to adapt and be flexible for our employees’ benefit. This will assist them with their career growth, their learning, their personal development – all in a way that suits them. It must be learner-centric. It also instantly gives us the ability to manage the performance appraisals and manage talent throughout the organisation. We also have an internal Mahara instance already but we see this playing a much stronger part in our future.